The making of SOS

:// INTRO

After having finished round 1 at ICS, I had the urge to develop a new environment. This one would be a departure from a retail environment. Two main ideas came to mind:

• first, the environment COULD NOT be a retail environment
• second, it had to be a small, unique space that would have more detail than I was used to (back then)

Curiously enough, I had been watching The melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya on Netflix.

Ah shit, this environment chose itself.

:// OP

The room itself is straight forward.

The challenge here was to bring it to a higher level while basically building the room 1 to 1. The issue with having chosen an anime environment was the I (now) realized that the render needs to match the animation frame 1 to 1 as well.

Being 2D, that could mean a custom toon shader (something which I have yet to mess with). This is what makes or breaks the translation of a 2D asset into 3D space.

:// HARDWARE ISSUES

The main issue for this build was the lighting. Looking at it (now), I can clearly see the lighting is not unified and all over the place.

I had spent so much time fine-tuning it that at the end, I basically gave up. The main reason behind this is that the rig I was using then was basically an off the shelf $300 dollar Dell with a graphics card stuck into it and a matching power supply as once I slapped that NVIDIA card in, the damn box would turn off on me because it couldn’t handle that much juice.

I had also added an external view of the school which would be viewed from the window.

But that brought the baking time from 40 minutes to over 3 hours.

For those not in the know, “baking” lighting into a 3D environment is you basically telling the PC “OK, I have this scene, with all these lights. Go!”

If you fuck up, which I did a lot. You have to restart the process again.

And you CANNOT touch your gear while the baking is going on, as it will use every damn resource available.

(unless you have a monster rig which will fly by so fast, it will undo you hairdo)

I did add personal sketches around the classroom as well. My 3D buddies and I had started a blog where we would upload sketches we would draw while in meetings. I have dug up and down the internet and I cannot find that blog anymore. But you can see our greatest hits scattered around the room.

:// ED

The main thing I took from this endeavor was that I was able to complete a quick turn around on a very aggressive timetable.

My main regret was not doing a final “love” pass where I would correct imperfections throughout the environment.

This is one piece where I REALLY struggled to make the decision to keep this on the site. I decided I would as this is part of my development history. Not to mention all the blood sweat and tears that went into it.

That is when I decided that from this moment forward, all of my completed projects would be on the site. That way I could look back and see the progression throughout the years.